What a PPC agency should own for an ecommerce brand
Whoever runs your search and shopping should own five things: brand term defense, the product feed, campaign structure that does not trap budget, search term hygiene and negatives, and reporting that separates branded from non-branded. The offer, the landing page and the total budget sit outside PPC. That last split is what decides whether the report means anything.
Brand terms, and whether to pay for your own name
The argument is old and both sides have a case. Against: people searching your brand name were already coming, and bidding on it buys traffic you would have received free. For: if you do not hold the top slot, a competitor or a marketplace listing of your own product can, and the click goes to them at a price they chose.
The honest answer depends on the results page for your specific brand terms, and whoever owns PPC should show you that page rather than argue from principle. What they should own is the test: hold brand campaigns off for a defined period, watch what happens to organic clicks and total branded revenue, then decide with the result in hand. What they should not do is report brand terms inside the same number as everything else, which makes the question unanswerable.
The product feed is the real lever in shopping
In shopping campaigns you are not writing ads. The feed is the ad. Titles, product types, GTINs, images, attributes, price and availability decide which queries you show for, and a feed with vague titles and missing attributes limits what any bidding strategy can do.
This is where the biggest gains usually sit, and it is also the least visible work, because feed changes do not look like campaign changes in a report. Whoever runs PPC should own the feed rules: how titles are constructed, which attributes are populated, how variants are handled, what happens when items go out of stock, and how quickly price changes propagate. If the answer is that the feed is whatever the ecommerce platform exports by default, that is the first place to work, and how we approach it is set out at plaidtesting.com/services/paid-media/.
Structure, search terms and negatives
Campaign structure is mostly a budget question. Budget sits at the campaign level, so a structure that puts your best performing products in the same campaign as slow movers lets the slow movers spend money the winners would have used better. The usual repair is separating by margin or by role rather than by category, so the budget you set is the budget that reaches the product you meant.
Search term hygiene is the maintenance underneath it. Someone should be reading the actual queries regularly, adding negatives, and moving terms that convert into their own structure. It is unglamorous, it compounds, and its absence is easy to detect: ask when negatives were last added, and ask to see the list itself rather than a summary.
Branded versus non-branded, and what sits outside PPC
This is the one that matters most. A report that blends branded and non-branded search into a single ROAS figure will look excellent, because brand terms convert cheaply from demand you already built. The account can look strong while acquiring almost nobody new. Ask for the split, then read non-branded on its own, with cost per new customer next to it.
What sits outside PPC: the offer, the landing page and the total budget. Search intent is the highest quality traffic you can buy, and it still cannot fix a price that is wrong, a page that loads slowly, or a budget set without reference to contribution margin.
With an athletic apparel brand, sales are up 35.7% year to date, reaching $9.27M, with paid media investment up 42% year over year and blended ROAS held at 3.36x across six months. Scaling was the deliberate call there rather than protecting efficiency, and the whole period was judged on blended ROAS instead of the platform figure.
If you are not sure which of those a partner currently owns for you, a free thirty minute audit from Plaid Testing will map it: tracking, account structure, three fixes.
